CEDIA 2007

It was disorienting to arrive in the Denver Convention Center and both have to re-learn where everything is and to try to maintain my bearings on the Show floor. The grid of floor sites is very approximately regular, with each numbered row thickening and thinning to complement its neighbors. At one point, I had let myself be led around to three different booths by a press representative, only to look up and not know which was the front and which was back!

As I cruised the first aisle, I was attracted to a stack of silvery components at the Wisdom Audio display. They had undulating curves to their front panels and, as they were stacked, they suggested foamy sea waves. More interesting was that, at the top of the stack, was a "system controller," which had a myriad of analog XLRs on the back. Turns out, as I learned from Mark Glazier, this is a combination loudspeaker EQ, speaker crossover, and Audyssey room EQ all in one. Offered to work with Wisdom Audio's new line of planar magnetic speakers, seen behind the electronics, this box has tailored EQ and electronic crossovers for the Wisdom line, which accounts for the fact that it has two XLR outputs for each of the main-channel XLR inputs. The speakers, themselves, are unusual for their neodymium-magnet planar drivers and their flat-diaphragm woofers, these driven by multiple voicecoils. Each of the speaker systems is available in in-wall, on-wall, and free-standing configurations with, of course, the appropriate EQ/crossover for each arrangement.